The U.S. presidential election is taking racism, and racist attacks against the international working class, to new heights. As Black workers are being killed by the police on a daily basis, Clinton and Trump have continually fueled the racism behind these murders.
Capitalism has always used racism to divide the working class—from enforcing segregation between Black slaves and white indentured servants to developing pseudoscientific theories about racial superiority. Racism has taken different forms among different groups of capitalists around the world depending on their needs, but few bosses have matched the genocidal brutality of the U.S. ruling class, within U.S. borders and through imperialist wars around the world.
In this context, the U.S. presidential election is really about which candidate, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, stands to inherit that legacy. The revolutionary communist Progressive Labor Party aspires to inherit a different legacy – a legacy of international working class unity against racism, sexism and imperialism. PLP fights for armed revolution for the working class to take state power, and smash the capitalist class, and their racist politician representatives.
Trump: Representative of Open Racism
Trump’s long history of racist attacks are first documented in 1973, when he was singled out in a court case for systematically denying apartments to Black people applying to live in his buildings. As the 2016 Republican nominee, Trump is making open racism the binding theme of his campaign by attacking Middle Eastern workers, Black workers and immigrant workers in the U.S. for the problems of capitalism that white workers are increasingly experiencing. He has encouraged his supporters to attack Black protesters at his rallies, and has accepted support from a host of openly racist Klansmen. Trump also brags regularly about his endorsements from most of the U.S.’ police unions.
While Trump has millions of supporters, millions of multiracial workers and students know Trump’s history and militantly oppose his open racism. More dangerously for the working class, however, is the long history of Hillary Clinton’s racist attacks. While Trump has played to openly racist workers, Clinton has spent her career leading racist attacks against the working class that have destroyed millions of families with a liberal, pro-worker mask.
Clinton: The Grooming of a Professional Racist
There’s a predictable upsurge in racism during every U.S. presidential election, at the least. The bosses’ politicians and media foment this racism to divert the working class from uniting against capitalism. Racist cops, mass incarceration, blaming Black workers for capitalist-caused poverty, and using racism and nationalism to convince workers around the world to fight each other in imperialist wars while the capitalists reap the profits, are how politicians earn their value in the eyes of the ruling class donors. In the eyes of many U.S. bosses, Clinton has earned her value as a professional racist, whose capabilities of maintaining racist working class divisions while stoking nationalist, pro-U.S. imperialist unity are second only to Barack Obama. Her history shows us how.
Clinton frequently champions her working class upbringing in an openly anti-Semitic household. She was a teenager in the 1960s during the height of the Civil Rights movement. While hundreds of thousands of young people marched against segregation, Clinton volunteered for Republican Barry Goldwater’s openly racist 1964 Presidential campaign.
While many workers have had racist upbringings that they later reject through struggle, Clinton’s early racism laid the basis for bigger attacks against the working class as a high-achieving and promising tool of the U.S. capitalists. While in Arkansas she supported her husband, Bill, then Governor, who signed a law supporting the Arkansas State Flag’s celebration of the Confederacy, the short-lived nation during the slaveholder’s rebellion during the 1800s.
While her husband was Governor, Clinton took a position on the board of Walmart, while they launched a campaign that built racism and nationalism to sell American-made products, called “Buy American.” This campaign to “Buy American” happened while Walmart hypocritically exploited slave labor wages in Asia (PBS, 11/16/04).
“Wal-Mart continued to get most of its products from overseas during its buy America program including from this factory in Bangladesh that used 11 and 12-year-old girls. (Good Morning America 1/31/2008).
The Clintons Get Promoted
The Clintons ultimately proved their worth to the ruling class as racist killers during the 1992 presidential election, when Bill Clinton was down in the polls: “Clinton proved his toughness by flying back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally impaired Black man who had so little conception of what was about to happen to him that he asked for the dessert from his last meal to be saved for him for later. After the execution, Clinton remarked, ‘[N]o one can say I’m soft on crime.’” (The Nation 2/10/16)
Bill Clinton won, and this racist execution foreshadowed the hiring of 100,000 more police officers nationwide, and his racist destruction of welfare (see below). Internationally, millions of workers in Mexico were driven off their lands by the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), as U.S. bombs rained down on the former Yugoslavia. Throughout the 1990s, when the U.S. wasn’t routinely bombing workers in Iraq, workers there faced sanctions at the cost of over 500,000 children’s lives. Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, later said this was “worth it.”
Hillary Follows Bill, Obama’s Footsteps
In 1994, Hillary Clinton campaigned for Bill Clinton’s Federal Crime that wreaked havoc on the working class calling it a “smart, tough” bill that will “make a difference in police officers lives.”  (White House Press Secretary, 8/10/1994). She followed that up in 1996 describing Black children as “super-predators” as openly racist a statement as anything Trump has uttered and a justification for the devastation caused by the new laws.
Hillary Clinton’s racist statements in 1996 describing Black children as “super-predators” are as openly racist as anything Trump has uttered, and had dire consequences. Among other crimes of Bill Clinton’s presidency, Hillary Clintons’ overt racism dovetailed with the skyrocketing numbers of incarcerated Black youth during the 1990s that, combined with the other attacks, wreaked havoc on the working class.
Bill Clinton presided over the largest increase in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history….he escalated [The War on Crime] beyond what many conservatives had imagined possible.. Human Rights Watch reported that in seven states, African Americans constituted 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison, even though they were no more likely than whites to use or sell illegal drugs. Prison admissions for drug offenses reached a level in 2000 for African Americans more than 26 times the level in 1983 (The Nation 2/10/16).
Hillary Clinton then led the charge to drive the poorest section of the working class into abject poverty by supporting her husband’s dismantling of welfare benefits, an attack that was another hugely disproportionate attack on Black workers, this time targeting single mothers and children. She bragged about her role in the onslaught, and of her service to ruling class, in the face of opposition. “I agreed that he should sign it and [I]worked hard to round up votes for its passage—though he and the legislation were roundly criticized by some liberals, advocacy groups for immigrants and most people who worked with the welfare system,” (Hillary Clinton, Living History, 2003). The result of Hillary Clinton’s efforts were that “By 1996, the penal budget was twice the amount that had been allocated to food stamps.” (The Nation, 2/10/20016)
The New York Times is one example of the leading ruling class mouthpieces praising their servant Clinton’s phony “record of service to children, women and families” (NYT Editorial, 9/25/16). Hypocritically, the exploitation of child workers in Bangladesh mentioned above is just one example of Hillary Clinton’s racist attacks on the very children she claims to champion. As Secretary of State in the Obama administration, she led the effort to start the civil wars in Libya and Syria that have shattered millions of lives, especially children, women, and families, and left the Middle East in flames. The Clinton State Department-backed militia in Libya is murdering Black workers on a mass scale. “ Peter Bouckaert, the emergencies director for Human Rights Watch, said there was violence throughout the uprising against black Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans in the capital, “It really is racist violence against all dark-skinned people,” Bouckaert said. “This situation for Africans in Tripoli is dire.”
It’s Not Clinton or Trump—It’s Capitalism
As the U.S. bosses’ imperialist rivalry sharpens with Russian and Chinese imperialism from the devastation in Syria to the South China Sea, the threat of increased racist, sexist, and imperialist assault on the international working class increase every day. Clinton and Trump’s racist campaigns to keep the working class divided mean the working class will lose no matter who wins the election. Clinton may very well defeat Trump, but this is no victory of the “lesser evil.”
For the international working class, Clinton’s services to the ruling class and crimes against the working class, of which this is a partial list, would just be getting started—on a bigger scale. But the bosses have a problem. Millions of workers around the world were inspired by the Black youth and workers rebelling in Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Baton Rouge, and now Charlotte.
These rebellions against racist police terror took aim at the very capitalist system responsible for racist mass incarceration and unemployment. On the other hand, the U.S. bosses know that to keep their sagging, but heavily-armed empire, they must win masses of U.S. workers, especially Black workers and immigrants, to sacrifice for U.S. imperialism, and fight in imperialist wars against their class sisters and brothers of other bosses’ countries.
PLP salutes the rebellious Black workers and youth who dare to fight back. PLP is organizing a mass movement in more than two dozen countries to spread the many flames of rebellion into a fire to burn capitalism to the ground once and for all. It is time to smash all the bosses, their politicians, and the racist system they represent, with communist revolution.